The benefits of SRC technology applied on several industries

Milestone’s new ultraWAVE 3 is the latest generation of SRC technology. It provides all the benefits of its revolutionary predecessor, while taking sample prep productivity and performance to the next level. Several aspects of the system, such as no batching, less operating time, and faster digestions, reduce turnaround time and increase lab efficiency for elemental analysis.

Simultaneous digestion of mixed-batch food samples for trace metal analysis

Mixed-batch digestion of large sample amounts for high productivity and improved detection limits

Introduction
 

Growing awareness and concern regarding food safety is reflected in the tightening of regulations governing toxic elements and compounds in food. Many toxic elements such as As, Hg, Cd, Pb etc. are routinely monitored, while minerals that are beneficial/essential to human health such as Se, Na, Mg, K, Ca, etc., are also measured.

Traditional sample preparation techniques for food include hot block and closed-vessel microwave digestion.

Hot block digestions are time consuming, suffer from airborne contamination, poor digestion quality, and poor recovery of volatile compounds.

Closed-vessel microwave digestion has proven to be an effective technique with fast, complete digestions, a clean environment, and superior recovery of volatile compounds.

Milestone’s Single Reaction Chamber (SRC) microwave digestion, is a revolutionary new approach, incorporating all of the benefits of closed vessel microwave digestion with new levels of convenience and effectiveness. The Milestone ultraWAVE 3 is a bench-top instrument that operates at very high pressures and temperatures, capable of processing large, dissimilar and difficult samples quickly, easily—all without batching. The data shown in this technical note demonstrates that the digestion of samples in the ultraWAVE results in uniformly high analytical data quality, making it the ideal solution for trace metals detection in any food matrix.

This industry report describes how a variety of samples from the food industry were digested simultaneously using the Milestone’s ultraWAVE 3, and this can be replicated in previous ultraWAVE generation, without sample-to-sample cross contamination.